Bitcoin Magazine

Citizenship By Investment: The Emerging Market for State Services via Citizen X

Accelerating the Sovereign Individual thesis, Citizen X is opening new doors for passport diversification focused on Bitcoiners with the recent acquisition of Plan B Passport. 

Citizen X, the tech-savvy Citizenship by Investment (CBI) company based in Switzerland, made a big splash this week with news of its merger with Plan B Passport, Katie “The Russian” Ananina’s Bitcoin focused CBI company. 

“They’re insanely into privacy and security,” said Katie about the company, explaining the ways in which this merger super charges both companies and can accelerate the “Sovereign individual movement.”

The Sovereign Individual, a book initially published in 1997, has quickly become a staple of Bitcoin culture, with a proliferation of the word ‘Sovereign’ in brands and memes all throughout the industry. 

The book posits a future where political power begins to decentralize from nation-states and legacy institutions to individuals, thanks to the economic forces unlocked by the internet and accelerating advancements in technology, like digital cash.

According to the book, growing trends in technology that favor individuals will increasingly persuade governments to compete for high-value talent, reframing the relationship between citizens and governments into a consumer-to-service-provider relationship. A market for state services and citizenships would become the norm as the entrepreneurs and wealth creators become increasingly agile, international and difficult to tax. 

The idea of the sovereign individual and the many predictions made in the book about how the digital age will play out has inspired many entrepreneurs and technologists, including Katie and Alex Recouso, the CEO of CitizenX. Since the book’s publication believers in the sovereign individual thesis have been positioning to take advantage of this paradigm shift and some are even working to accelerate it. 

Demand for a modern update to government processes intended to create more efficient state services appears to be a growing trend, with Elon Musk’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) initiative blessed by Trump representing a recent example. The political structures and institutions that built the world many of us were born into are, arguably, in many cases outdated and increasingly obsoleted by technological advancements. 

It is Katie’s personal frustrations with immigration bureaucracies throughout the world that lead her to start Plan B Passport. As a young star athlete and professional Russian sailor, she was denied visas and even got scammed by an immigration lawyer, forging her experience with immigration laws in both the US and Europe.

“I was denied European visas twice, an American visa once, and I was in a Russian national team. I was coming to Europe for the World Championship. How do you deny me a visa? I’m 15 years old, coming with my coach and the team, like, what’s the logic?” Katie recalled.

Katie was scammed by a US immigration lawyer, an event that challenged her to learn the system and laid the groundwork for the foundation of the company.

“That’s how it all started. I got to the US, paid $12,000 to an immigration attorney only to be ghosted. Literally. Basically, she just stopped responding to my emails and phone calls, and I had to self-represent,” she told Bitcoin Magazine.

Katie was soon after introduced to the Sovereign Individual Book.

“I obviously re-read the book way too many times, specifically the chapter on the end of nation-states,” Katie explained about the Sovereign Individual thesis. “The way they talk about it is that basically there will be a competition between nation-states for talent, the fruits of labor, and the capital. They naturally will compete by providing a better service at a better price, just like an actual capitalistic environment.”

“It’s accelerating right now,” she added. “Investment-based migration, that’s the way forward for governments now. That’s where you can dictate with your capital who you choose to benefit from your capital and the fruits of your labor. And you choose them according to the taxes, the lifestyle, the social environment, the freedom of speech, and all those good things.”

However, Bitcoiners have not had an easy time getting their wealth recognized or accepted in exchange for citizenship. Bureaucrats working at embassies often know little, and legal firms servicing this market need to do serious due diligence, often requiring proof of funds and expecting bank statements. But for the longest time, Bitcoiner companies have been unable to get bank accounts and Bitcoiners have had accounts closed when suspected of trading Bitcoin or crypto.

Throughout most of Bitcoin’s history, banks and governments not only ignored the digital asset and its entrepreneurs (with a few exceptions), but actually avoided relationships with the industry, in part due to political pressure from policy programs like Operation Choke Point.

Indeed, Bitcoiners were so underbanked that, for example, Tether, the biggest stablecoin in the digital currency market, was invented to give the industry a way to hedge and trade into dollar value, given that access to the banking system was rarely a good option.

This lack of recognition by legacy systems created a gap in the market that Katie identified: “I know Bitcoiners’ pain points better than anybody in the industry. I know Bitcoin itself better than anybody in the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) industry, and I could provide Bitcoiners with solutions that others couldn’t,” she told Bitcoin Magazine.

“All those countries that provide citizenship by investment,” she explained, “they have very thorough due diligence. So they want to see the source of funds. Bitcoiners come to any other CBI player who is a dude in a suit in his law office and say, ‘Hey, I mined bitcoin,’ or ‘I bought bitcoin in MtGox. It’s been in self-custody ever since. How do I prove it?’”

“They’ll be like, Mt-what?” she chuckled. “They will have no idea how to prove the source of funds. Obviously, they just want to see a financial institution statement.”

But Bitcoiners often have no such financial statements, and obtaining them could require the sale of significant amounts of bitcoin, triggering a tax event in many countries that could drastically increase the costs involved, deterring Bitcoiners from these CBI programs.

To make matters worse, the privacy risks faced by Bitcoiners are different from those in legacy finance. Bitcoin is not reversible, after all. Theft and extortion of bitcoin often leads to year long investigations that rarely yield results or recovered funds. The security of bitcoin value is thus best preserved at the current time by not being an obvious easy target in the first place, and that means preserving your privacy and minimizing the amount of people who know you have bitcoin at all or how much.

This is very different than the fiat system where having a few bankers or lawyers know your bank account balance as they fax it to each other in plain text is not great, but not a critical threat either. Transactions can generally be reversed and in a worst-case scenario, refunds can be printed out of thin air by their fraud risk departments to cover user loss.

Because of Bitcoin’s transparency, your Bitcoin wealth can be revealed to relative strangers, which can trigger people’s envy and, in the worst cases, even lead to cybersecurity threats or physical attacks in attempts to steal and extort funds.

To address these risks and the knowledge gap between Bitcoiners, the CBI industry, and the relevant government institutions, Plan B Passport built relationships with citizenship units: government officials in jurisdictions with CIB programs. Plan B also launched an innovative program that unlocked a more secure path to satisfy the proof of funds standards for Bitcoiners.

Such users would simply have to sign a message with the corresponding private keys to a Bitcoin public address, demonstrating in an off-chain, cryptographically provable way that they own the coins on that address. CheckMSG.org is an example of such technology. The cryptographic proof would then be reviewed and co-signed by a competent institutional partner, a US or Swiss firm, and a financial statement would be issued that Citizenship Units at the specific jurisdictions can work with.

“Originally, they were a little concerned about this whole thing,” she recalled about initial reactions to the program. “If we talk about four or five years ago, they would say, ‘Well, sell it into fiat and show it to us.’ Okay, whatever. But now, just like in the Sovereign Individual thesis—they realize, ‘There’s a lot of Bitcoiners who want passports, and we better serve them because that’s our money, that’s our bread.’”

The benefits of having a sophisticated technological approach in an industry that is otherwise very traditional in its tooling, differentiate CitizenX and Plan B Passport from their competitors. The merger could elevate the quality of CBI options available to Bitcoiners and empower Katie to open new markets and launch policy education initiatives in countries that might not know how to service this market.

“And honestly, that’s one of the motivations behind this acquisition. The whole sovereign individual movement, I feel like I had to really say no to quite a few opportunities that I knew could potentially result in accelerating this movement, simply because I was a sole founder, managing the processing department, managing the sales, right? All that stuff. And I felt like I just don’t have enough time and enough resources, enough talent to go and build out these other programs in the world that I know Bitcoiners would want to see,” Katie explained.

“So I had to pass on these opportunities. And through this acquisition, I think we get into the space, into the state where we can truly launch those new immigration initiatives and lobby for them in different jurisdictions, just so those small nations can get into the game, realize what they have to offer, realize what their market price is, and how they can benefit from launching a citizenship or residency by investment program, and I want to be there to help them do that,” she concluded.

This post Citizenship By Investment: The Emerging Market for State Services via Citizen X first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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